I've always felt my greatest strength as a photographer/printmaker is my ability to take a range of images and merge them into an iconic language, equal parts metaphor and commentary. I'm a visual wordsmith, but with a wry sense of humor. My Cans and Feathers series are prime examples of an anthropomorphism that for me translates inanimate objects into beings and characters that speak for themselves. It's a fascinating process when a crushed can found on a city street becomes an Aztec warrior, or a galaxy. When feathers become citizens.
My Etching series is a much more psychological journey.The series is expressive of both a personal evolution and the conflicts inherent in painful self-analysis. I find they present a powerful visual, both beautiful and frightening. But self-analysis is both beautiful and frightening.
My role as an artist is to dig into those elements that shape this inner dialogue - fears, dreams, fantasies, and memories. I examine these “dark” corners to discover the “essence” of what is personal and yet universal. Similar to the way we all at one time or another make decisions, my work is meant to draw you in and repel you at the same time." While my images can be both beautiful and beckoning, I want the viewer to understand that beauty comes at a price.
Metaphorical Objects
In 2006 I started to gather plants from the park and using a very old photographic technique, I placed them on top of black and white photography paper and let them sit there in a garden for up to two days. I then collected the photo paper and brought it to my darkroom where I fixed the images created by sun - light passing through and around each of the species of plant life I collected. This is the technique that Henry Fox Talbot used in 1840 when he created some of the first permanent photographic images. It’s also a technique many children have used with sun proof paper.
My intent was to create unique images from this process – sharp and soft, sophisticated yet reminiscent of childhood, representative of a species and yet individual at the same time. I think of these images as portraits of species that we pass on our walks everyday but never think about. And yet they are denizens of the park that exist timelessly, and will persist long after we are gone. Everything around us forms a web of experience that forms us and changes us.
Exploration
My exploration of creativity is always evolving. For me, the artist's role is to dig into the elements that shape an inner dialogue - fears, dreams, fantasies, and memories. An artist must probe the “dark” corners to discover the “essence” of what is personal and yet universal at the same time. An artist should never be afraid of making mistakes.
I began as a photographer and over time moved into multimedia. My first foray into print making began with photo tests and darkroom mistakes that intrigued me when they began to chemically change after I discarded them. I began collaging these “errors,” re-photographing, scanning and contact printing them onto a photosensitized etching plate. Then they were etched, aquatinted, and printed. Each image has its own set of unique, individualized decisions made on the plate itself. Each image reflected a different artistic strategy. I expanded my print making skills into collagraphs using feathers. The feathers symbolized different elements of society; individuals, families, classes, leaders.. I found my self moving further and further away from pure photographic images. When I began making monotypes, I realized a depth that I could not express through straight photography. But this in turn, helped my photography become more sensitive to abstract languages.
My woodcuts, however are influenced by cubism and surrealism. Drawings were achieved through montaging photographs and then drawing elements from the combinations. This is a trick of the surrealist, to come up with unexpected results from everyday events, also a takeoff of the exquisite corpse idea. The use of woodcut allows me to delve deeply into personal feelings that can’t be expressed in my photographs. The images are more spiritual and searching for some meaning of the unknown. I want to transcend the natural world and find deeper meaning in my inner world. The lack of depth in the woodcuts adds to the spatial abstractness of the imagery. Juxtaposing objects at different angles and incorporating diverse objects into one, force a new meaning onto the objects or their surroundings. All my images have elements of the known or objective world it is just the separating of parts and the incorporation of diverse elements that turns the work into abstractions.
